An intellectual asset management (IAM) system is used to schedule legal matters and manage aspects of intellectual property assets. Examples of intellectual property assets may include: patents, third party patents, trade secrets, publications, trademarks, third party trademarks, domain names, copyrights, and applications or filings thereof. An IAM system may support docketing and other related activities in the full lifecycle of intellectual property assets, such as invention disclosure submission, trademark search requests, multi-party collaboration, document and e-mail management, configurable business workflow rules, and business intelligence tools, among other features. An IAM system may also support indication and management of intellectual asset family relationships, such as parent and sibling patent applications, parallel foreign filings, national phase filings for the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), continuation applications, divisionals, provisionals, etc. An IAM system provides visibility and access to internal and external participants in the intellectual asset management process—for example, attorneys, agents and paralegals, researchers and engineers, portfolio managers, marketing, licensing professionals, and other business managers.
Some challenges facing users of intellectual asset management systems are creating, indicating, and maintaining intellectual asset family member relationships and ensuring data consistency. As an example, for a given invention or collection of related inventions, an entity may acquire a portfolio of related patent documents filed in different jurisdictions around the world. As another example, an intellectual property law firm may be tasked to file a national filing for an invention that already has an existing family of related patent applications, where these related patent applications are being prosecuted by other law firms. In each of these examples, an entity, whether a corporation or a law firm, for example, desires to store and manage details of the invention and all of the associated related patent applications and issued patents. The process of creating, indicating, and maintaining intellectual asset family member relationships and ensuring cross-member data consistency can be difficult, time-consuming, error-prone, and inconsistent.
The subject matter claimed herein is not limited to embodiments that solve any disadvantages or that operate only in environments such as those described above. Rather, this background is only provided to illustrate one example technology area where some embodiments described herein may be practiced.